When comics in newspapers (“funnies”) were first invented in the 1900s, a thousand crazy ideas were tried in every local newspaper in the country.

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When comics in newspapers (“funnies”) were first invented in the 1900s, a thousand crazy ideas were tried in every local newspaper in the country. Most of these local attempts at this new media were awful, but many of these earliest comic strips and later comic books were truly innovative, original, and bizarre.

There was nothing like them before – or since. Even the underground comix in the 1970s were not as strange and unusual as these now-forgotten visionaries. Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969 presents a sampling of overlooked fantastic and fantastical comics harvested from small town papers, yellowing zines, and short-lived strips. Like many other types of first-attempts, there is still much to be learned from these odd pioneers.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/23/update-ivan-brunettis-nancy.html/feed0My failed attempt to draw the Nancy comic striphttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/22/my-failed-attempt-to-draw-the.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/22/my-failed-attempt-to-draw-the.html#commentsMon, 22 Dec 2014 12:00:54 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=354645Nancy is a harsh taskmaster; resuscitating it was a grueling task, but the challenge was invigorating and edifying. By drawing Nancy, I realized that every character (even the environment) in a strip is the cartoonist and is invested and imbued with the cartoonist’s life force.]]>This is daunting. Certainly, there have been numerous much better cartoonists who have sung Nancy’s praises more articulately and lyrically than I possibly ever can. Actually, those same artists were responsible for initiating my own journey with Nancy, pointing me towards its beauty and intricacy. These earlier collected editions of Nancy contained seminal essays that forever and profoundly changed the way I look at comics, draw comics, and now teach comics; I absorbed these words as much I did the strips themselves. In retrospect, I can see Nancy as a rivulet of influence that runs through the list of just about all my favorite cartoonists.

Nancy nurtured me when I was a budding cartoonist, before I ever picked up a nib or radiograph (abandoning markers forever) or used a drafting tool, much less invested in the luxury of bristol board. Back then, I was still figuring out that you could—in most cases, should—draw your original larger than the intended print size. In fact, all of the above ideas entered my brain as the direct result of my seeing photographs of Ernie Bushmiller at his worktable. In that pre-Google world, when cartoonist and scholar were often one, these archival bits and pieces gradually unlocked the mysteries and mechanics of cartooning for me.

Through a Dickensian matrix of circumstances too arcane to describe here, in 1994 I found myself unexpectedly involved in the morally questionable endeavor of applying for the job of drawing the Nancy comic strip. After a decade of experimenting with a new style, the syndicate had decided to ditch their current cartoonist and reinstate the “classic” look of the strip, with updated gags reflecting 1994’s technologically advanced texture of life; in other words, instead of hinging a gag on a TV repairman, now one could refer to a cable-TV repairman. Meanwhile, I was in the middle of drawing what was to become my first professionally published comic book, the content of which was so abrasively, uncompromisingly solipsistic that I could only envision a marginal audience, if any. In addition, I was pretty inept at my full-time copyediting job and feared my eventual firing. Despite my ethical trepidation and distaste for the concept of not only continuing a dead cartoonist’s work but also contributing to another one losing his job, the prospect of making a living through drawing (any kind of drawing) was just too enticing to pass up. Well, I tend to make poor life decisions.

In my defense, I sincerely gave it a pretty good go: I drew about nine weeks’ worth of strips, earnestly, respectfully, and dutifully copying the Bushmiller style, trying to do it reverential justice. Mercifully, my attempt was ultimately abortive. But this is when I truly learned how to be a cartoonist: using quality materials, inking with drafting tools when a mechanical line was called for, exploring texture as value, drawing very large originals for greater freedom and control, planning diligently while streamlining the flow of the narrative, forcing myself to consider the entire strip’s composition (i.e., the “page”) much more carefully, avoiding haste and sloppiness, working methodically, and learning to appreciate craftsmanship, consistency, and precision. Every material, tool, technique, and method that I currently use came directly out of my experience drawing Nancy, this brief metaphysical apprenticeship under the maestro Bushmiller.

Nancy is a harsh taskmaster; resuscitating it was a grueling task, but the challenge was invigorating and edifying. By drawing Nancy, I realized that every character (even the environment) in a strip is the cartoonist and is invested and imbued with the cartoonist’s life force. This is perhaps why continuing a strip after a creator’s death is so misguided, and it also explains the precious few exceptions that prove the rule: those cartoonists made the preexisting characters truly their own, commandeering their ink-on-paper souls.

Try as I might, I never “became” Nancy. I am not a problem solver. I am mechanically disinclined. I am a horrible pessimist. For me, form follows dysfunction. I live in the past, not in the moment; conversely, Nancy takes place in an ever-present present, an unbreakable now. I couldn’t see the world through her eyes, and so writing the strip was always a contorted, strained affair. I could only mimic the surface of Nancy, the lines and shapes and marks, sometimes even the scale and rhythm. However, without truly knowing the essence of the main character (in effect, knowing the heart of Bushmiller), my feeble copies had neither a wellspring nor a true undergirding, and without this empathic architecture, the pages were, at best, insubstantial as ghosts.

I realized that fiction works best when it’s autobiographical, and vice versa. Nancy never became autobiographical for me, the way I imagine it functioned for Bushmiller, and thus I could never devise compelling stories for the characters. No matter how much I loved drawing Sluggo (and especially his decrepit house), he remained external to me. I wasn’t a very good mimic, either, and I became painfully aware of my scant capabilities and ample limitations as an artist; over time, I tried to wring these technical shortcomings into a style of my own, lest I perish. Always I looked to Bushmiller’s unpretentious, unfussy drawing for guidance and inspiration.

Fortunately, Nancy is deep and rich, and contains cartooning multitudes: between the orderliness and drafted contours of Nancy’s house and the organic, wobbly scumbles of Sluggo’s, there spans a whole universe of drawing, an inexhaustible system of depicting reality—not light dancing on surfaces, necessarily, but the linear clarity of a Platonic substructure that maps our existence in the world. This has served me, and countless other cartoonists, very well. Thank you, Mr. Bushmiller.]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/22/my-failed-attempt-to-draw-the.html/feed0Art of the Simon and Kirby Studiohttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/the-art-of-the-simon-and-kirby.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/the-art-of-the-simon-and-kirby.html#commentsMon, 15 Dec 2014 12:00:37 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=353022Over the course of three decades Joe Simon and Jack Kirby wrote and illustrated several hundred comics, many of which are reproduced in The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio covering all aspects of their amazing career. Selected and with an introduction by Mark Evanier, the foremost authority on the work of Simon and Kirby, the book includes artwork photographed from the original art in Joe Simon’s private archive and showcases the seminal work of Simon and Kirby and their artistry as it has never been seen before.

Adventures of the Fly no. 1 (August 1959). Archie Comics. “The Strange New World of the Fly” illustrated by Kirby and Simon. “Come Into My Parlor” illustrated by Kirby and Simon. “The Fly Discovers His Buzz Gun” illustrated by Kirby and Simon. “Magic Eye” illustrated by George Tuska.

Cartoonist Reed Crandall was one of EC Comics' many superstars in the 1950s, drawing stories for Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Tales from the Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales, The Vault of Horror, Extra!, Impact, Piracy, Weird Fantasy, and Weird Science-Fantasy.

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Cartoonist Reed Crandall was one of EC Comics' many superstars in the 1950s, drawing stories for Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Tales from the Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales, The Vault of Horror, Extra!, Impact, Piracy, Weird Fantasy, and Weird Science-Fantasy. As a freelancer, he drew stories for various publishers. His splash page from “Hot Spell” in Warren's Creepy #7 (1966) shows why Crandall was one of the greats. (Full-size page)]]>

The great illustrator Drew Friedman drew a portrait of the great cartoonist Daniel Clowes. Amazing! 10 prints are available.

Drew Friedman rendered this portrait of cartoonist, illustrator, screenwriter and friend Daniel Clowes, at work in his studio.

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The great illustrator Drew Friedman drew a portrait of the great cartoonist Daniel Clowes. Amazing! 10 prints are available.

Drew Friedman rendered this portrait of cartoonist, illustrator, screenwriter and friend Daniel Clowes, at work in his studio.

Clowes launched his solo anthology comic book series Eightball in 1989. At first Clowes mainly presented humorous stories, but gradually began to introduce more reflective and literary themes. The comics were subsequently adapted into graphic novels. Such works as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron redefined the graphic novel as an art form. The complete Eightball anthology is forthcoming from Fantagraphics.

His graphic novel Ghost World, about two girls and a nerdy record collector, was adapted into a film, which he co-scripted with director Terry Zwigoff (who directed Crumb). The film, which starred Thora Birch, Scarlett Johannson, and Steve Buscemi, earned Clowes an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Another Eightball story, Art School Confidential, was adapted to film in 2006 (with Zwigoff as director).

Daniel's comic work has been anthologized and accorded countless honors, including a Pen Award for Outstanding Work in Graphic Literature, as well as over a dozen Harvey and Eisner Awards.

Drew Friedman has a personal connection to Clowes. When Drew served as comics editor for National Lampoon in 1990, he hired Clowes to produce a monthly comic. They remained friends and Clowes wrote the foreword to Friedman's anthology The Fun Never Stops! Clowes, like Friedman, owns a beagle (Ella).

Here's the pencil sketch:

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http://boingboing.net/2014/11/01/drew-freidman-portrait-of-dani.html/feed0Cartoonist Ed Piskor visits his decrepit childhood homehttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/cartoonist-ed-piskor-visits-hi.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/cartoonist-ed-piskor-visits-hi.html#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 22:48:19 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=334951Ed Piskor says: "Pittsburgh magazine followed me around for a few weeks and put together a little piece on me and the Hip Hop comic.]]>

Ed Piskor says: "Pittsburgh magazine followed me around for a few weeks and put together a little piece on me and the Hip Hop comic. The highlight is going through my decrepit boyhood home for the first time in like 18 years and seeing artwork on the walls that survived."

I loved seeing Ed in this 8-minute film, which was produced by Dave Cole. Favorite quote: "There's not enough money in comics to listen to anybody. You should just do what the heck you wanna do."
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David Letterman sometimes says, of certain eccentric (usually brilliant) people: “She (or he) ain’t hooked up right.” He means it as a compliment.

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David Letterman sometimes says, of certain eccentric (usually brilliant) people: “She (or he) ain’t hooked up right.” He means it as a compliment. Lynda Barry definitely ain’t hooked up right – and we’re all more enriched for the strange wiring.

So, it’s no surprise that when the well-known comic artist sat down to write a book about the craft of writing (based on her popular writing workshops), she’d end up with something utterly unlike any previous writing guide. Like all of Barry’s work, What It Is is disarmingly personal and brilliantly playful and chaotic.

This densely collaged book is utterly uncategorizable – so many modes of expression are at work here: a textbook/workbook on inspiring creative writing and cultivating creativity of all kinds, a comic-memoir of Barry’s personal struggles with creativity and self-expression as a child, a stunning and challenging piece of collage/altered book art, and a sort of extended fever dream on the nature of memory, imagination, play, and creativity.

Barry’s ultimate message is about waking up to yourself, to your potential as a creative being. It’s an extended pep talk on finding the inspiration between your ears and using your senses and memories of life experiences to express yourself in ways that can truly enrich your life. It’s hard not to open up this book, poke your head into its dream-like sea of memory-ticklers, imaginative ideas, creative inspiration, and surreal imagery, and not want to put it down immediately to go make something of your own. As if to drive home the beastly, manifold nature of our deepest reservoirs of creativity, Barry introduces the Magic Cephalopod (aka squid), a sort of creature from the Id, who swims through the murky depths of the text, its many appendages constantly in creative motion, gently encouraging us to swim off on some grand adventure inside of the Mariana Trench of our own imaginations.

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/24/what-it-is-how-to-channel.html/feed0Absurd and brilliant comics designed to be read right-side-up as well as upside-downhttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/18/absurd-and-brilliant-comics-de.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/18/absurd-and-brilliant-comics-de.html#commentsThu, 18 Sep 2014 23:33:43 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=332753

That’s when Verbeek drew 65 episodes of “The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo” for the New York Herald, all of which are reproduced in their full size and original colors in The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek.

That’s when Verbeek drew 65 episodes of “The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo” for the New York Herald, all of which are reproduced in their full size and original colors in The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek. Influenced in no small part by the 19th-century Japanese joge-e drawings he saw as a child, Verbeek created six-panel comics designed to be read right-side-up, then flipped over so that his silly, Punch-and-Judy-style story lines could be continued when read upside-down. More than a century later, one can almost hear the fluttering of newspapers across Manhattan on Sunday mornings.

Drawing an image so it would be reasonably comprehensible when read in more than one direction was not the only optical trick up Verbeek’s sleeve: Also included in Upside-Down World are examples of the artist’s 1905-1914 Herald strip called “The Terrors of the Tiny Tads,” which follows the antics of a handful of young scamps as they cavort through dreamy landscapes filled with drivable hippos, elephants that double as hotels, and monkeys with the bodies of backgammon boards. More modern in appearance than Lovekins and Muffaroo, the Tads are charming, if mischievous, imps, looking a lot like forerunners of the scamps inked decades later by Maurice Sendak.

Drew Friedman is the great caricaturist of our age. His series of portrait books, Old Jewish Comedians, More Old Jewish Comedians, and Even More Old Jewish Comedians brought him well-deserved acclaim when they came out a few years ago. His latest book of meticulous watercolor portraits is called Heroes Of The Comics, and it includes short biographies of dozens of famous and not-famous-but-important cartoonists, editors, writers and publishers from the golden age of comics. I had no idea what many of the comic book artists I've admired for decades looked like, and it was a treat to finally see the faces of Steve Ditko (Spiderman), Dave Berg and Jack Davis (Mad), and John Stanley (Little Lulu), rendered in Friedman's detailed style, replete with liver spots, wrinkles, and rumpled clothes.

Friedman even included one villain amongst the heroes: Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who used flawed data to write Seduction of the Innocent, the infamous 1954 anti-comics scaremongering book that led to the end of the vibrant comic book industry and the careers of many of the heroes in the pages of Friedman's book.

http://boingboing.net/2014/08/22/drew-friedmans-portraits-of.html/feed0Mimi Pond: "MAD was our communist manifesto"http://boingboing.net/2014/07/30/mimi-pond-mad-was-our-commu.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/30/mimi-pond-mad-was-our-commu.html#commentsThu, 31 Jul 2014 01:00:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=321732bombfell.com/gweek to get $10 off your first purchase. And by Stamps.com — get a $110 sign-up bonus with the offer code GWEEK!]]>

In the 1980s Mimi Pond was a cartoonist and illustrator for such publications as the National Lampoon, the Village Voice, The New York Times, Seventeen Magazine, Adweek, and too many more to mention, as well as writing and illustrating five humor books, beginning with the national best-seller, The Valley Girls’ Guide to Life. She wrote the first episode of the animated series, The Simpsons, and has written for other television shows as well.

With her husband, the artist Wayne White, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and since then has continued to write and to draw cartoons for numerous national magazines.

In 2014, her graphic novel, Over Easy, a fictionalized account of her post-art school waitressing career in Oakland, California in the late 1970s, was published by Drawn & Quarterly and has been on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Dean and I enjoyed chatting with Mimi. Her are a few things she talked about:

Graphic novels: I have been enjoying a number of graphic novels recently. My favorite artists include Vanessa Davis, Miriam Katin, Joe Ollman, Joyce Farmer, Seth, Rutu Modan, Esther Pearl Watson, Leela Corman, Lauren Weinstein, Judith Vanistendael, Derf Backderf. I prefer things that have real storylines, real narratives. There’s so much stuff out there that may be well-executed from a technical standpoint, or really perfect-looking, but when there’s a real dearth of good writing, it just adds up to a big fat nothing. Also it’s kind of unnerving when things are too perfect. I prefer the drawing to look a little funky, like the artist got their boogers and their blood on it while they were drawing. Mad Magazine, both the Bantam paperback re-issues of the EC originals, and 1960s Mad Magazine were like our bible, our communist manifesto in my house while I was growing up. I will just straight up tell you I have no interest in anything superhero, or action-adventure, or science-fiction related. I just don’t care about that stuff! I resent being made to feel like because of some comics tradition I should school myself and APPRECIATE the artistry of all the “great” superhero comics artists. I mean, I do appreciate it, but at the same time, especially growing up as a girl, there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN IT FOR ME. The girls very rarely got to be in on the action, they were just there to get in trouble and then get saved. That’s boring. And even with characters like Wonder Woman, who goes around saving the world...I’m not interested in saving the world. I’m interested in complex characters and human relationships and moral ambiguity.

Books: I could go on and on. I love to read biographies and autobiographies from high to low. Like, everything from a bio of Edith Wharton (brilliant author! horrible anti-semite!) to Zsa-Zsa Gabor’s One Life is Not Enough - (big fat liar). I read ‘em all. In terms of fiction, I love (like I said) Edith Wharton, Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith. I love narratives where the hero or heroine is really kind of horrible, but the author MAKES you cheer them on anyway. I love that kind of complexity.

One evening several years ago my friend, the artist Coop, took me to the San Fernando Valley house of comic book art collector Glenn Bray.

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One evening several years ago my friend, the artist Coop, took me to the San Fernando Valley house of comic book art collector Glenn Bray. I was somewhat familiar with Bray, having read bits and pieces about his large collection. I knew that he was the first person to seek out and collect the work of the great Donald Duck comic book artist writer Carl Barks back in the 1960s, that he published some small books about grotesque-artist Basil Wolverton, and that he was the champion of forgotten genius Stanislav Szukalski (read my Wink review about Szukalski here). He was probably the first real comic book art collector, buying original work in an era when everyone else considered it to be worthless.

So I felt I was somewhat prepared for what was in store for me at Bray’s house. But when I stepped inside, I realized that I’d greatly underestimated the size and quality of his collection. Bray’s walls were covered with original art and paintings by the greatest comic book artists in history: Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and dozens more. The second floor of his large house looked nothing like a home. It was a clean, organized library/museum dedicated to comic book art. I was stunned, not only by the amount of art Bray had amassed over the last 50 years of collecting, but by his aesthetic sensibility, which matched mine to a T. Like me, he was completely uninterested in superhero comics, concentrating mainly on old EC science fiction comics, MAD, and underground comics. That evening I studied the original art from many iconic comic book covers, but barely scratched the surface of his collection.

The Blighted Eye is a massive book containing samples from Bray’s collection. Arranged from A-Z by artist, it represents the tip of a comic art iceberg. The book also includes a long interview with Bray and many photographs of Bray with the artists he’s befriended over the decades.

Every time I speak to Peter Kuper, the conversation invariably turns to New York — or, as is often the case, begins there. It’s my own fault. I’ve got this insatiable need to ask fellow residents, artists in particular, what keeps them in the city’s orbit. Kuper is a particularly interesting case study, having left the city — and country — in 2006, for a life in Mexico.

It was, as one might, expect, a multifaceted decision to move his entire family down to Oaxaca, in part an attempt to expose his daughter to another language and culture — and certainly leaving the country at the height of George W. Bush’s second term was seen as a net positive for the oft political cartoonist. A few years later, the Kupers found themselves back in New York, but the experience generated, amongst other things, the lovely Diario De Oaxaca, a sketchbook diary chronicling Kuper’s time in Mexico, immersed himself in the area’s stunning counter-cultural murals.

More recently, Kuper returned to the book’s publisher, PM Press, in hopes of helping to anthologize World War 3 Illustrated, the progressive comics anthology he co-founded with fellow New York cartoonist, Seth Tobocman. The process was a touch more complicated, and when we sat down to speak at the MoCCA Arts Festival back in April, the duo had recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Even outside the long-running anthology, Kuper’s career has long been both fascinating and diverse, from multiple Kafka adaptations and his 2007 semi-autobiographical Stop Forgetting To Remember to an on-going stint as Mad Magazine’s Spy Versus Spy artist. So, you know, plenty to talk about.

Chris Yates is a polymath. A sculptor, artist, woodworker, cartoonist, entrepreneur, dog-kennel assembler, musician, and more. He's best known now for his handmade jigsaw puzzles. He's on the show to talk about his zigzag path to making a niche for himself.

New Relic helps everyone's software work better, and if you’re in any business today, you’re in the software business. Software powers our apps, runs our databases, manages our accounts, and runs ecommerce sites and email programs. New Relic monitors every move your application makes, across the entire stack, and shows you what's happening right now. Visit newrelic.com/disruptors to find out more.

What do Lil Wayne, Black Girls CODE, and Humans of New York have in common? They've all raised funds on Indiegogo! Indiegogo has hosted over 100,000 campaigns since 2008 and distributes millions of dollars every week around the globe. There is no application process or waiting period associated with launching a campaign; individuals can start raising funds immediately. Listeners visit tnd.indiegogo.com to receive a 25% discount on fees.

Abraham Finberg, CPA: From dealing with those pesky 1099Ks to complex accounting needs, go to finbergcpa.com for all your financial support. Services can be as simple as a 15-minute phone consultation session all the way up to outsourcing your whole internal accounting office. Use promotion code DISRUPT to get a free phone consultation today!

The New Disruptors is a podcast about people who make art, things, or connections finding new ways to reach an audience and build a community. Glenn Fleishman is the host, and he talks with new guests every week. Find older episodes at the podcast's home.

Support The New Disruptors directly as a patron at Patreon starting at $1 per month, with on-air thanks, premiums, and more at higher levels of support. We do this show with your help. Thanks this episode to patrons GravityFish, Garry Pugh, and Abraham Finberg!

]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/04/10/new-disruptors-70-chris-yates.html/feed0Documentary "Stripped" shows the past and future of comic stripshttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/01/stripped-cartoons-film-release.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/01/stripped-cartoons-film-release.html#commentsTue, 01 Apr 2014 11:23:25 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=295478Glenn Fleishman on a crowdfunded journey into the history of comics in America]]>Stripped is a new film about comic-strip history and cartoon artists, and about the scary and wonderful future we're living in, that's been four years in the making. It was funded in part by two Kickstarter campaigns and produced by two guys, long-time buddies, who had never made a full-length feature film. And it's wonderful from start to finish.

Strippedgoes on sale today (April 1) at iTunes, and the filmmakers are hoping to make a splash and drive it up in the rankings to expose it to more people. On April 2, it will be released for the same price as well on Google Play and on VHX, a DRM-free distribution service, where you can stream on any compatible device as well as download the film for later playback. (Update: It's now on sale at VHX, where you can buy the basic film for $14.99, or with all sorts of extras and bonuses at higher prices.)

The film traces the history of comics in America, telling the story about the end of the age of engraving that spurred creation of cartoons as a genre; through the heyday, when cartoonists were among some of the best-known celebrities; across the decline in fortunes of newspapers; and into the present and future, including the folks behind PvP, Penny Arcade, Family Man, The Oatmeal, and more.

Don't worry: this isn't a movie that fetishizes the past or grumbles about the transition to digital and the Internet. One of the co-creators of the movie is one of the longest-working webcomics artists, Dave Kellett! (His collaborator is a veteran cinematographer, Fred Schroeder.)

The filmmakers interviewed over 80 people, and snippets from dozens of those interviews are in the movie. It's a work with scope, heart, and insight. It includes parts of an audio interview with Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes, who also drew the film's poster — his first public cartooning work in 19 years!

You can listen to a recent interview I conducted for The New Disruptors with Bill and Dave.

I've read cartoon strips and panel-style comics since the moment I could make out words, and have spent a sizable amount of the intervening years in that activity. While I fell away from comic books for a good two decades, and only returned in the digital reader era, I never stopped picking up a newspaper every morning. When comics came to the Web, I added those to my rounds, too.

Stripped is both for old fans, like me, who remember when comics were reproduced in newspapers at a larger size than today, and made more of an impact on culture and politics; and new ones, who grew up alongside webcomics and may have never seen any traditional long-rectangle, square, or circle formats in print or even online.

The guys behind the film, Dave and Fred are two of the nicest people you might ever meet, and their sweetness shows through: this is a love letter to the field, and fills a gap in documentary history. Dave has two Master's degrees in cartooning, and they plan to make sure the raw footage is available to future researchers, too.

(Note that this film is quite specific to comic strips: recurring work with typically, but not exclusively, a repertoire of regular characters and sometimes ongoing storylines, published at frequent intervals, such as daily, in a periodical or online. This also includes work published a bit at a time and later collected into book form. Even with that focus, which excludes most editorial cartooning and comic books, the film still bursts with material.

As a kid in the 1970s, I recall seeing newspaper and magazine stories about cartoonists, and was a huge fan of Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz. But the movie makes clear how ridiculously famous some of them were across decades of their careers. People recognized them in the street, they were regular guests on talk shows and game shows, and could make the front pages like a movie star.

There was also more power to prod and provoke change in the past. Al Capp's L'il Abner caused fashion trends and political arguments, while Pogo was the Doonesbury of its day, even more so. And Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, at its height in the 1970s and 1980s, unnerved presidents and politicians.

A trenchant analogy for the business of strips: a video-game boss fight

It's hard to imagine a comic strip having this sort of impact in 2014: newspapers have lost their power, readership of all media is splintered, and the strips that remain have little ability to shift opinion. Trudeau's idea of social justice these days is, rather than an ongoing parody of Kissinger teaching a university class, some of his protagonists listing off Starbucks' employment benefits.

The film traces the origins of comic strips back before my knowledge, despite having read a few academic books on the subject. Periodicals employed huge numbers of engravers as publications were able to produce issues more cheaply and faster with the combination of hot-lead typesetting and printing improvements.

But the moment offset photographic reproduction became possible, engravers who had honed their art were mostly out of work, and turned their hands to creating a new popular culture medium. (David Malki of Wondermark is a historian of this era, mining it for his strip, and explains it in fascinating detail.)

The movie also deals frankly with issues surrounding syndication, with cartoonists explaining how much money they gave up, but also the incredibly tedious and intensive sales work that syndicates did (and still do) to get strips picked up and to get them to continue to run.

One of the most short-sighted things newspapers ever did was shrink cartoons and trim their numbers: as a licensing expense, it was modest; newsprint costs drove more of it. People are loyal to local sports scores (including high-school teams), local news, the weather, and the comics. Newspapers forgot that.

Legendary cartoonist Griffy is among those interviewed for Stripped.

I grew up in a medium-sized town with a single newspaper, but many cities had two or more newspapers through the 1980s and even 1990s; a few still do. In those towns, part of the competition among newspapers was for specific popular strips, and some ran two to four pages of comics at somewhat larger sizes.

As the confluence of increased paper costs and Internet-fueled circulation declines led to cutting staff and pages, comics were seen as part of the ballast to be flung off to keep the high-flying margins aloft. (Newspapers commonly made 25 percent or higher profit margins because of a captive advertising market.)

Thus we visit the present and glimpse the future, through a clever video-game style walkthrough of how online comics have taken off. Dave and Fred know from Dave's firsthand experience, starting with an independent online-only comic in 1998, and talked to other pioneers, as well as folks who have made a partial transition from — or hybrid between — print and online, and newly minted popular cartoonists, like Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant.

Though his story isn't told in the movie, Rich Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) is a perfect example. Cartooning was a side project for him, and he moved it to the fore. He was syndicated, but his quirky strip intended for digerati failed to find an audience, and he had to meet newspaper standards and reproduce it in black-and-white. He made terribly small amounts of money. The syndication world wasn't a fit, but he's developed a huge audience over years online that supports all the different work he creates.

Stripped is a rare film that gives you a fair, in-depth, emotional, and factual runthrough of an entire slice of (mostly American) artistic and creative history. The filmmakers plan to release more material over time; crowdfunding backers received access to extended and additional interviews, and more of that will come out over time.

The biggest mistake you could make (beyond not buying a copy) would be fast forwarding through the credits. At the end of the film, a music video with a neat combination of stop-motion, animation, and live action with Kate Micucci of Garfunkel and Oates, recaps the entire history of picture-based storytelling.

Isabel Greenberg is a writer and illustrator who lives and works in North London. In her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Greenberg combines art, mythology, and humor to tell a story of star-crossed love.

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Isabel Greenberg is a writer and illustrator who lives and works in North London. In her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Greenberg combines art, mythology, and humor to tell a story of star-crossed love. It takes readers back to a time before history began, when another—now forgotten—civilization thrived. The people who roamed Early Earth were much like us: curious, emotional, funny, ambitious, and vulnerable. In this series of illustrated and linked tales, Greenberg chronicles the explorations of a young man as he paddles from his home in the North Pole to the South Pole in search of a missing piece of his soul. There, he meets his true love, but their romance is ill-fated. Early Earth's unusual and finicky polarity means the lovers can never touch.

]]>You need to enable javascript to enter this campaign !Powered by PromoSimple.

Earlier this week David reviewed and previewed the large-format book, The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius by Jennifer George. The publisher, Abrams ComicArts, has kindly offered to give a copy to one lucky Boing Boing reader. To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is use the above form to "like" Boing Boing's Facebook page (and if you already have liked Boing Boing's Facebook page, you are in the running to win.) Good luck!

Note: if you aren't on Facebook, don't despair. We will hold more giveaways in the future that don't require Facebook membership.

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/14/giveaway-the-art-of-rube-gold.html/feed0David Rees is getting bored sharpening pencils at $35 apiecehttp://boingboing.net/2013/09/19/david-rees-is-getting-bored-sh.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/09/19/david-rees-is-getting-bored-sh.html#commentsThu, 19 Sep 2013 18:24:57 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=257025How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, has a pencil sharpening service.]]>How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, has a pencil sharpening service. He charges $35 to sharpen each pencil. To date he has sharpened 1,804 pencils. But he is growing weary of the work and is thinking about closing the business.

"The whole point of the business is to remind people to appreciate yellow, No. 2 pencils because they're really cool and interesting," he said. "And to make a ton of money."

But at this point, work feels like work.

"You do anything long enough for money, it just starts to become a job," he said.

So as he nears the nice round number of 2,000 sharpenings, Rees suggested that soon he'd like to clean out his sharpeners for good, leaving the world a much duller place.

New York man sharpens pencils for $35 a pop]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/09/19/david-rees-is-getting-bored-sh.html/feed0Cartoonist Adrian Tomine - "everyone we know is moving" out of New Yorkhttp://boingboing.net/2013/09/09/cartoonist-adrian-tomine.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/09/09/cartoonist-adrian-tomine.html#commentsMon, 09 Sep 2013 15:43:32 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=254767Adrian Tomine's New Yorker cover is called "Crossroads." He was interviewed about it on the New Yorker's website.
When asked how being a father affects New York living, he says, “We live in a notoriously kid-centric neighborhood, so it’s not like I’m walking around, gritting my teeth, and thinking, Oh, the sacrifices I make for this kid!]]>Adrian Tomine's New Yorker cover is called "Crossroads." He was interviewed about it on the New Yorker's website.

When asked how being a father affects New York living, he says, “We live in a notoriously kid-centric neighborhood, so it’s not like I’m walking around, gritting my teeth, and thinking, Oh, the sacrifices I make for this kid! Most of the things that become difficult or impossible when you have kids, I was never really into anyway.” As for the teeth-gritting moments? “You can definitely drive yourself crazy thinking about the cost of living here, but I try to remind myself that the monthly check I send off is giving me access to a lot of great things beyond our apartment.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/09/09/cartoonist-adrian-tomine.html/feed0Cartoonist Ed Piskor interviewedhttp://boingboing.net/2013/04/01/cartoonist-ed-piskor-interview.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/01/cartoonist-ed-piskor-interview.html#commentsMon, 01 Apr 2013 18:53:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=222493Here's our own cartoonist Ed Piskor being interviewed at Columbus Museum of Art by Jared Gardner on March 24, 2013. It's great to hear him talk about his influences and interests in this hour long conversation.]]>

Here's our own cartoonist Ed Piskor being interviewed at Columbus Museum of Art by Jared Gardner on March 24, 2013. It's great to hear him talk about his influences and interests in this hour long conversation.

Ed Piskor is the recipient of the Columbus Museum of Art and Thurber House 2013 Graphic Novelist Residency. He has drawn stories for underground comics legend Harvey Pekar, and published the book Wizzywig about the history of hacking. His current comic, Hip Hop Family Tree, is serialized at Boingboing.net. The first volume of Hip Hop Family Tree will be published this year by Fantagraphics.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/04/01/cartoonist-ed-piskor-interview.html/feed1The Rise of Web Comics: a short PBS documentaryhttp://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/the-rise-of-web-comics-a-shor.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/the-rise-of-web-comics-a-shor.html#commentsFri, 15 Mar 2013 17:50:08 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=219100It was fun to see the faces behind some of my favorite web comics in this brief PBS documentary.
The internet has given birth to yet another new medium: web comics.]]>

It was fun to see the faces behind some of my favorite web comics in this brief PBS documentary.

The internet has given birth to yet another new medium: web comics. Moving beyond the restrictions of print, web comic artists interact directly with audiences who share their own unique worldview, and create stories that are often embedded in innovative formats only possible online. Sometimes funny, sometimes personal, and almost always weird, web comic creators have taken the comic strip form to new, mature, and artistic heights.

More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain.

Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg -- leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country.

With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.

Al Capp, A Life to the Contraryby Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen

PREFACE

Once upon a time, long before Garry Trudeau entertained newspaper comic strip readers with his astute political commentary in "Doonesbury," before readers visited the Okefenokee Swamp and followed the social satire in Walt Kelly's "Pogo," before comic strips were aimed at the hearts and minds of adult readers, Al Capp introduced his followers to a hilarious mythical Kentucky hillbilly hamlet known as Dogpatch. The strip, "Li'l Abner," created and drawn by Capp from the very beginning, ran for forty-three years and, at the height of its popularity, reached a worldwide readership of more than ninety million.

Although it had its charm, Dogpatch was populated by folks just a few steps behind modern big- city ways. Turnips provided the town with its only known source of income, pigs were raised as both pets and a primary food source, single women literally chased eligible bachelors in the annual Sadie Hawkins race (with the captured men forced into wedlock), and creatures with such unlikely names as shmoo, kigmy, and bald iggle dropped by as figures in Capp's humorous observations on the human race. Politicians and businessmen did their best to bilk Dogpatchers out of the puny bit they did possess. The typical story ran for weeks on end, until even Capp himself seemed occasionally befuddled over where his winding plots would end up.

Abner Yokum, the strip's title character, lived with his parents, Mammy and Pappy Yokum, and by all appearances had everything a perennial nineteen-year-old could possibly want. He was tall, handsome, muscular, and constantly being pursued all over the hills by Daisy Mae Scragg, the most beautiful single girl in Dogpatch, who, for reasons escaping any other male in the vicinity, wanted only a man totally uninterested in her. Abner was naive on his best day, dumb as a fencepost on his worst, and always caught up in an adventure more complicated than his native intelligence could handle. Al Capp delighted in working him in and out of trouble, using his predicaments as stagings for satire, parody, and a brand of comedy that won the praise of Charlie Chaplin, John Steinbeck, Hugh Hefner, John Updike, and a host of others.

Capp's rise to prominence was swift and unprecedented. As far back as the turn of the twentieth century, comic strips had bolstered newspaper circulations and earned their creators fame and fortune. "Hogan's Alley," an early comic dynamo featuring a kid wearing what appeared to be a yellow nightshirt, touched off newspaper wars, while a beautiful surrealistic strip called "Little Nemo in Slumberland" guided its readers through previously unexplored regions of the subconscious. Other strips and one- anel cartoons aspired to do little more than deliver daily punch lines. Action and adventure strips, boasting of long-running plots that held readers' attention for weeks and even months, were capturing the country's fancy right about the time "Li'l Abner" made its debut.

Capp had no idea where his strip would take him; he only knew that he wanted to succeed as a cartoonist. He knew, from an early age, that he could draw, and he'd kicked around art schools and worked on a few shortlived jobs before landing a breakthrough job as an assistant to Ham Fisher, the creator of the enormously popular boxing strip "Joe Palooka." It was only a matter of time before Capp struck out on his own.

The world was ready for "Li'l Abner," which started out as an adventure strip but quickly developed into a humorous feature with long-running stories usually associated with such comics-page favorites as "Flash Gordon," "Dick Tracy," or "Little Orphan Annie." Readers, still bruised from the Depression and fearing the events in Europe leading to World War II, connected with Capp's adult humor, outrageous adventures, buxom female characters, and snide but spot-on commentary. "Li'l Abner" shot to the top in very little time and would become one of the most widely read strips in comics history. Capp was a wealthy man before he celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

But this was only the beginning. Restless and hypercreative by nature, Capp trained his sights on how to broaden his artistic and financial horizons. His marketing genius led the way. Besides developing ideas for new comic strip titles, he pushed to find ways to nudge his "Li'l Abner" characters off the comic strip pages and into previously unexplored or barely explored territories. There were product endorsements and, more lucrative yet, merchandising blitzes tied into the strip. In one year alone, the shmoo, a cuddly little critter capable of providing humanity with everything it ever needed, grossed $25 million in merchandising -- and this was mid-twentieth century dollars.

Capp created a new template for the successful comic strip artist as he went along. "Li'l Abner" blazed the trail for such future marketing phenoms as "Peanuts" and "Garfield." Then, when Dogpatch USA opened its gates in 1968, Capp became the only cartoon creator other than Walt Disney to have his own theme park. By that point, Capp's face had appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, he was a regular contributor to Life, his mug had been seen on countless newspaper and magazine ads, and he was a regular guest on television, most notably The Tonight Show. Comics artists had almost always been solitary figures spending hours alone at the drawing table, collecting good salaries but remaining relatively unknown to the public. Al

Capp changed all that, through the force of sheer ambition, talent, marketing know-how, and a winning personality.

Capp created his own success, but he might have been destroyed by it as well. A contrary individual by nature, he was more apt to argue than agree with you. If someone or something was popular, chances were Capp would find a way to skewer it in "Li'l Abner." The high and mighty would be cut down to size, sometimes playfully, as in Capp's parodies of Frank Sinatra and John Steinbeck, sometimes savagely, as in the case of his commentaries on Joan Baez and the antiwar activists of the 1960s. Anyone or any idea could be a target. Even when he was at his silliest, as in "Fearless Fosdick," his long-running send-up of Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy," something dark seemed to be bubbling just beneath the surface.

This contrary attitude, once so amusing to his readers, lost its charm when his political views took a sharp turn to conservatism and he crisscrossed the United States in a lucrative but dizzying series of appearances on college campuses, where he aggressively confronted his student audiences. When he was implicated in a couple of sex scandals while touring the universities, even his close friends Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew couldn't save him. His career's downward spiral rivaled its ascent in sudden and dramatic fashion.

Capp's fall from grace, the retirement of "Li'l Abner" from the daily papers, and Capp's death in 1979 did little to lessen the comic strip's legacy. "Li'l Abner" has been available in reprint editions (nearly forty volumes, in total) for all but a few years since Capp's death, and it has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and theses. Li'l Abner, the play, at one time a smash hit on Broadway, continues to be performed by professional, student, and local theater groups. Sadie Hawkins Day, an annual feature in the "Li'l Abner" strips, is still celebrated in dances and events across the country. Expressions originating in the strip -- "double whammy," "hogwash," and "going bananas," to name a few -- are still part of the everyday vernacular. For Capp, it all began with a traumatizing yet defining moment early in his life, a fateful meeting with a trolley car.

This piece by Wally Wood, which I don't think was for EC [the comic book company that published MAD, Weird Science, and Tales from the Crypt], is genius for its organized complexity—seemingly effortless in its execution.

]]>Thom Buchanan of The Pictorial Arts says of this mind-boggling Wally Wood illustration:

This piece by Wally Wood, which I don't think was for EC [the comic book company that published MAD, Weird Science, and Tales from the Crypt], is genius for its organized complexity—seemingly effortless in its execution. Zoom in on the figures and see how fully realized they are! I cannot overuse the word when it comes to EC guys—they were geniuses!

I love R. Crumb's sketchbooks. I have three of them, which are facsimile editions of his sketchbooks from the 60s and 70s.

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I love R. Crumb's sketchbooks. I have three of them, which are facsimile editions of his sketchbooks from the 60s and 70s. I paid about $100 per volume. This six volume set for Taschen is $1000. It looks great, but I don't think I'm going to plunk down that much cash.

This six-book boxed set is the first collection of Robert Crumb sketches to be printed from the original art since the hard-bound, slipcased, seven volume series issued by the German publisher Zweitausendeins between 1981 and 1997. Unlike the Zweitausendeins edition, which included every doodle ever made by the preeminent underground artist, our best-of edition has been personally edited by the notoriously picky artist to include only what he considers his finest work, including hundreds of late period drawings not published in previous sketchbook collections. Robert Crumb requested that the books representing the second half of his career be published first due to fan demand for new Crumb material (Volumes 7-12 cover the period 1982-2011, and the forthcoming Volumes 1-6 will cover the period 1964-1981).

In the last 20 years Crumb's artistic output has slowed considerably, making new works more rare and highly prized. This collection of over 600 unseen drawings created between 1982 and 2011 makes this a must-have collectible for every Crumb fan.